At the VMworld Tech Field Day Roundtable, I thought that Infino offered a great value add to those of us that have more than one hat in our job role. Today I am going to give you a insite to what the product is, how it gives you nearly instant results, and show you can how you see the value.

Infino is VMware acceleration in a box. Setup is as easy as downloading the application, agreeing to the licence agreement and walking through the wizard.

Connect to vCenter

Choose Datastore

Verify Accelerator Resources

Setup Infino Management

Install Infinio Accelerator

Importing Management VM

Configuring IP settings

Synchronizing with vCenter

Deploying And Configuring Accelerator VMs

Install Complete

But wait, what did we just install? What is Infinio? It is a shared Memory Cache. All hosts share a single cache, deluplicated and stored once.

Here we have it, the dashboard shows your value.

First let's dig into : Storage boost and Requests Offload.

Storage boost shows you the boot gained, and the number of disks it would take to provide the same boost.

Requests offloaded shows the number of requests that never had to go to disk, and the trend of those requests.

Wait I brought up deuplicated cache, whats does that mean? This should deduplicated workload's with VM's that have like memory set's.

As you can see in the line graph's, the product is providing I/O, therefore, lowing the latency, on the array.

My Impression of the product is this:

Infinio is all about providing a product, that you use, easily; without a knowledge expert, or a block of professional services from your var.

Need a use case?

If you are under the gun to provide performance in a environment that is growing, or it has increased demands. The product has the ability to be deployed fast, and without any hassle, and you get to see the results. Why is this important? A lot of IT Admin's or System Admins have little time, and need to be able to be agile. I know, as I am a Admin in that role.

Thoughts and Comments? I plan on getting more time with Infinio in the future. Expect more to come!

"There’s a treasure trove of value to be found here. We’re talking about things like full workstation class user experience with high-performance 3D graphics, enhanced abilities to access virtual desktops from any HTML5-capable web browser, a beautiful new iOS 7 client, as well as a completely rewritten Windows client with support for Windows 8.1. As if all of that weren’t enough already—we’re providing a brand new way to use Horizon View in Desktop-as-a-Service deployments using View Direct Connect. And one more thing: support for deploying Windows Server 2008 as a desktop."

Horizon View 5.1 introduced VCAI as a Tech Preview feature that enabled customers to try VCAI with partner storage systems that support VAAI NAS primitives. Horizon View 5.3 introduces support for VCAI with select partner storage technologies (listed in question 2 below). VCAI leverages capabilities of VMware vSphere as well as some of the NAS storage arrays that have vSphere API for Array Integration (VAAI) NAS native snapshot capability. This feature enables customers to offload the creation of linked clones to the storage array. It is used in conjunction with linked-clone desktop pools and NFS datastores that are exported by NAS storage arrays.

2. Which partner storage technologies support VCAI?

As of the Horizon View 5.3 release date, the following partner storage technologies support VCAI.

Vendor

Storage

Firmware*

Hitatchi Data Systems (HDS)

Hitatchi NAS 4000 Series

v11.x and later

*Vendors expect VCAI to work on these and later firmware versions.

3. What is the support model for VCAI on Horizon View?

The VCAI feature in Horizon View is supported only on specific storage arrays from certain vendors (listed in question 2 above). The VMware Global Support Services (GSS) organization provides joint customer support for this feature on those arrays only.

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Therefore, unless you are running at Hitatchi NAS 4000 Series, put the breaks on! Althrough, I am sure we will see more storage support soon.

I recently attended a EMC training class, titled VNX Unified Storage Performance Workshop, and we worked a lot of .nar files. As soon as I got back in the office, I found I wanted to combine .nar files to get a larger date range when looking at them.

It prompts you for the case# or a description of your choice. It will append this into the file name. This outputs the files to E:\emc\nar_out\ with a sub-folder for the date. with a temp location of E:\emc\nar_out\Temp.nar. The output file name come out like Merge - input - date .nar